1. Field of the Invention
The present application claims priority to French patent application 98 11443, filed Sep. 4, 1998, according to 35 U.S.C. 119(a)-(d).
2. Description of the Related Art
In the past few years, there has been developed and designed integrated circuits called “contactless”, arranged to receive or transmit messages using electromagnetic induction by means of an antenna coil. Such integrated circuits are for example described in the international applications WO 98/02840, WO 98/02980, WO 98/05123, WO 98/06057, WO 98/06056 of the applicant. These circuits allow contactless chip cards to be provided, which should progressively replace conventional contact cards.
In view of the important number of contact card readers existing in the market, the question quickly arose to know how the passage from the contact card technology to the contactless card technology could be done in a simple and rational way, without being necessary to replace all the existing readers and all the contact cards held by users.
There have thus been proposed chip cards with two operating modes, or hybrid cards, comprising both contact zones and an antenna coil. The applications WO 98/06057 and WO 98/59319 of the applicant relate to such hybrid cards.
However, hybrid cards having a substantially higher cost price than the two other types of cards, it is probable that contact cards will continue to be commercialized. Thus, the market of chip cards will comprise, in a near future, contactless card readers, contact card readers, contact cards, contactless cards and hybrid cards.
In order to decrease the total number of chip card readers, one has thus also thought to design readers with two operating modes, able to equally interact with contact chip cards and with contactless chip cards.
The application WO 97/46964 describes such a reader, comprising [FIG. 10] a read head [50] for a contactless chip card and a read head [28] for a contact chip card, both heads being connected to the communication bus [62] of the central processing unit [64] of the reader by means of a multiplexer [61]. According to the position of the multiplexer [61], the central processing unit [64] is thus connected to the contactless read head [50] or to the contact read head [28].